Quiet Moments of Sweetness

This is one of my best memories of Sunday, my worst of Kenny. I fear I haven't captured Sunday or his voice quite right, but a work in progress, I suppose.

Kenny had had Kitton over the night before and I had come over as was my habit, eager to get to know the notoriously eccentric Kitton. I remember she was wearing her long, long hair under a pink bobbed wig and a very short skirt. She sat next to me on Kenny’s couch and leaned in close. I felt a slight charge run between us, an exhilaration. Was she flirting with me? Was she interested? I wanted her to be, but not desperately. We chatted about her modeling projects, about her history in the circus while Kenny flitted lazily around, his ubiquitous glass tumbler of vodka, tonic and cran in one hand, ice clinking and watching us with his sleepy eyes. Kenny’s friend Bruce came over, and I went out to use the restroom and came back to find everyone seated for whatever atrocious movie we were going to watch and make fun of. Kenny and Kitton were sitting close on the couch and she was holding his hand, something I never did with him in public, despite intensely touchy-feely tendencies, because he had said he didn’t want us to look too much like a couple. There was nowhere left for me to sit except on the other side of Kitton and I was angry not to be able to show my affection for Kenny, not to have my role as something more than friends acknowledged or introduced to her. I didn’t care if there was one of us on either side of him cuddling, I would have welcomed a threesome but being unacknowledged and cast aside rather pissed me off. Yet I didn’t know what to do. So I sat. And I watched the stupid movie and I stewed.

And it got late. Kitton asked Bruce “Should I get a ride home?”
Kenny interrupted “Why don’t you spend the night? You can borrow a pair of my pajamas.” And I knew he sure as hell wasn’t planning to have either of them spend the night on the couch.

At last Bruce left. I stayed, angry and wanting to be acknowledged, and yet powerless so I too left and went to bed thinking maybe they were just going to spend the night snuggling like we sometimes did.

The next morning Kenny had the hotel “Do Not Disturb” sign that I’d grown to loathe hooked over his door knob. I remember having something important and frustratingly academic that needed doing but being so angry about the night before and the sign that I could hardly concentrate. I glared at it every time I had to walk past his door to use the bathroom and the drinking fountain and every time it made me angry. Suddenly I was recalling how Kenny was always oddly pointing out that Kitton was on her period when I was and how long he’d been away when he went to see her the last time, and the marks I had found on his body when he came back. And I was angry at myself for not noticing before and angry for being angry at all and letting something so stupid distract me. This was not how I had wanted things to be.

Finally, unable to take it anymore, I left, hauling my heavy computer bag up the million flights of stairs to the Apartment to study. I sat huddled at the dining room table, stewing and unable to concentrate while the boys watched something loud on TV.

Sunday came breezing in before I had gotten out so much as a sentence.

“Hey gorgeous.” He said in his usual greeting. He stood bending over the back of my chair, hands gently stroking my shoulders. I leaned back into him.

“What are you working on?” He asked surely, though I could not see his face, peering with comically screwed up eyes at my computer screen.
“Mph.” I mumbled into his arm. “Stress. I couldn’t concentrate in the dorm, but I’ve got to get this done so I’m here, though I haven’t been terribly productive here either. Don’t stop doing that with my shoulders, it feels so good.”

“Mmmhmm.” He chuckled. His voice deep and vibrating into me where my back was pressed to him.

“If you want you can study in my room, I’m going out for a while so you can have it all to yourself, it will be quieter there.”

“Thank you,” I said, feeling a little better already “that would be amazing.”

He helped me carry my things to his room and set up at his desk and finally I let it spill.

“Kenny had Kitton over last night and I think she’s still there.” I told him “He’s had his stupid ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on the door since I’ve been up this morning, and I think he’s still holed up in there with her doing god knows what. I got more angry every time I saw the damn sign until I couldn’t stand being over there anymore. And I can’t stand being angry about it, it’s so stupid, so not worth it and I need to have a serious talk with him but I can’t because she’s still over there.”

He sucked in a breath. “So they’re having sex.” It wasn’t really a question.

“I don’t know. They could have just cuddled, that’s more or less what we did in the beginning.”

This sounded flimsy even to me and I could tell from his expression that he thought it unlikely. I wondered what judgments he had already passed on me and how I was different from the Kittons of the world.

“I’m really sorry hun.” He said and he wrapped me up in his arms. I buried my face in his chest and relaxed gratefully into his warmth, the softness of his t shirt, his smell like clean laundry and musk and a hint of cigarettes and his solidness around me. He closed his chin over my head and held me for a long, long time and I felt so safe.

“What do you want to do about Kenny?” He asked after a while, warm and quiet into my hair.
“I think I need to tell him it’s not going to work if he’s going to keep treating me like this, and I think…” I made up my mind; “I think I’d better do that right now so I can get it over with and get to the school work, and if she’s there, well, I’ll just have to drag him out.”

“Good girl.” He said and kissed my forehead. And I smiled weakly at him, feeling warm and fuzzy and cared for even as I rallied to march off to confront my lover.

----

Did I cry, I think I cried. But I had pulled myself together by the time I got back to the Apartment. I went strait into Sunday’s room and Sunday was still there and I let myself be swept up in his arms again.

“How did it go?”
“Done, over with, gone. I asked him if he’d had sex with her and he wouldn’t tell me. I told him I thought I had made it clear that I wanted to know who else he was involved with and how if I was going to be involved with him and he said he didn’t believe our casual and infrequently serious sexual relationship warranted that so I broke up with him.”

“Congratulations.” He said, and he wouldn’t be the last to say it. “Darling, you do know that you’re gorgeous and smart and an incredible person and that you deserve to be with someone who can take care of you and isn’t emotionally retarded like Kenny is?”

“I know” I whispered back laughing softly. And I did. And I was starting to feel, for the first time, what it could be like to be really taken care of when I needed it and it felt so good.

I was suddenly very tired.

I told him sagging deeper into his embrace, eyelids feeling very, very heavy. He scooped me up and tossed me gently onto his mattress-on-the-floor bed.

“Lie down and rest for a little while.” He said, pulling the covers up around me.

“But the paper,” I protested, hardly convincing myself, “I’ve got to work on it….” My eyelids were already drooping shut.

“Sleep” he whispered. “I’m going to be out tonight so you can stay as long as you like.” He stroked and kissed my hair.
“Goodnight darling, sleep well.”
“Thank you.” I said.
He turned out the lights and left locking the door behind him.

I hadn’t thought that I would be able to fall asleep but I drifted quickly, hopelessly and in the way I love best. I floated in a darkness of thankful half sleep until he brought me back to reality, softly opening the door. I tried to stand, to get back to work, I hadn’t intended to really take a nap but sleep’s gravity pulled me back to the bed again. He chuckled softly at my failed attempt to stand.


“Hey beautiful, you look so comfortable, don’t get up yet.” he lay down on the floor next to the mattress and I rolled over to be close to him. He spooned me through the duvet, with the half of him that got over the mattress. With that much between us, it didn’t feel like much of a transgression against Austin and yet it still felt indefinably sweet.

After some time he climbed up to his roommate’s bed and did take a nap, sprawled over the covers. He snored like a freight train, too loud for me to sleep through but I didn’t care. I didn’t care at all.

At last he woke up and finally went out as he’d been planning to. I stayed in his bed for a while, feeling so warm and whole even remembering what had happened with Kenny. I didn’t spend the night, it seemed somehow dangerous, like Austin would come back with him in the morning and find me there or he would come home and forget why I was there. I wanted to, I wanted his face to be the first thing I saw in the morning and I think he wanted that too but the time wasn’t right.

You might say I started loving Sunday that day, as a friend, as a human being. He had fulfilled a deep craving I had had for as long as I could remember, to be picked up off my feet on a really bad day and selflessly taken care of by someone who wasn’t doing it because he was supposed to or to get something out of it but because he wanted to and because, for whatever reason, he cared. Whatever happens between Sunday and I, it is a memory I will always treasure.